Overview

The definitive, Jolt-award winning guide to learning and using Rails is now in its Second Edition. Rails is a new approach to web-based application development that enables developers to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications using less code and less effort. Now programmers can get the job done right and still leave work on time.

NEW IN THE SECOND EDITION: The book has been updated to take advantage of all the new Rails 1.2 features. The sample application ...

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This Book

Overview

The definitive, Jolt-award winning guide to learning and using Rails is now in its Second Edition. Rails is a new approach to web-based application development that enables developers to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications using less code and less effort. Now programmers can get the job done right and still leave work on time.

NEW IN THE SECOND EDITION: The book has been updated to take advantage of all the new Rails 1.2 features. The sample application uses migrations, Ajax, features a REST interface, and illustrates new Rails features. There are new chapters on migrations, active support, active record, and action controller (including the new resources-based routing). The Web 2.0 and Deployment chapters have been completely rewritten to reflect the latest thinking. Now you can learn which environments are best for your style application, and see how Capistrano makes managing your site simple. All the remaining chapters have been extensively updated. Finally, hundreds of comments from readers of the first edition have been incorporated, making this book simply the best available.

Rails is a full-stack, open source web framework that enables you to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications with a twist...you can create a full Rails application using less code than the setup XML you'd need just to configure some other frameworks.

With this book, you'll learn how to use Rails Active Record to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. You'll learn how to use the Action Pack framework to route incoming requests and render pages using easy-to-write templates and components. See how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, talk to web services, and interact dynamically with JavaScript applications running in the browser (the "Ajax" architecture).

You'll see how easy it is to deploy Rails. You'll be writing applications that work with your favorite database (MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and more) in no time at all.

James Duncan Davidson is a freelance author, software developer, and consultant focusing on Mac OS X, Java, XML, and open source technologies. He is the author of Learning Cocoa with Objective-C (published by O'Reilly & Associates) and is a frequent contributor to the O'Reilly Network online website as well as publisher of his own website, x180 (http://www.x180.net), where he keeps his popular weblog. Duncan was the creator of Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant and was instrumental in their donation to the Apache Software Foundation by Sun Microsystems . While working at Sun, he authored two versions of the Java Servlet API specification as well as the Java API for XML Processing. Duncan regularly presents at conferences all over the world on topics ranging from open source and collaborative development to programming Java more effectively. He didn't graduate with a Computer Science degree, but sees that as a benefit in helping explain how software works. His educational background is in Architecture (the bricks and mortar kind), the essence of which he applies to every software problem that finds him. He currently resides in San Francisco, California.

Justin Gehtland, a professional programmer, instructor, speaker and pundit since 1992, has developed real-world applications using VB, COM, .NET, Java, Perl and a slew of obscure technologies since relegated to the trash heap of history. His focus on "connected" applications led him to COM+, ASP/ASP.NET and JSP. Justin is the co-author of "Effective Visual Basic" and "Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET" (both Addison Wesley). He is currently the Agility columnist on The Server Side .NET, works as a consultant through his company Relevance, LLC, and teaches for DevelopMentor.

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Anonymous

Posted March 29, 2007

Only for expert web developers.

This book has a number of problems .. 1. The code to be typed in by me started out being complete listings of the file, than became just the parts to be added but with weak or no clues about exactly where to put in the new changes. Then old code is included in new code till finally, its complete guess work about exactly what the author intended the reader to do. Did he intend me to replace the entire contents of the script with this new script? If not, than where am I supposed to put the new code? Finally about page 110 I ended up with a snippet that looked like it was intended as a replacement of the file contents and my beautiful results turned to incredibly ugly instances where code showed up in the browser instead of what was intended. The listing at the back of the book does not include the file in question, so I cannot determine where I went wrong. I have no choice but to stop, start all over, or try to find the code as intended on the referenced sites. 2. Playtime is pulling the hair out time. Obviously, if I were an expert, I could enjoy this book, but I'm trying to learn something here. The book presents several things to try to figure out on your own, which is always a good way to learn but in all but one instance, the RIGHT way is not mentioned. I do not like having to do guess work which leads to just bad coding habits or assignments that are clearly the result of the book being intended for those who already know the answers! I love the author's attitude, he shows that he understands much of the frustration that programming can entail but his book demonstrates the fact that technical books should be read by someone of the intended audience, so as to determine where confusion and vagueness exist before publishing, for this book has proved to be af first a source of much hope, then suddenly turned into a source of much grief, sorrow and frustration as I will have to go out and try to find another book to learn rails with that makes clear sense. This book raises more questions than it answers.

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